Businesses are requiring more agility in how they design and develop new products and services. With the ever expanding global economy, these businesses are requiring that knowledge be transferred and leveraged from across their organization or partners no matter where their or their partner's employees are located in the world. However, the need for protection of any knowledge shared becomes ever the more important as the free flow of capital, knowledge, and people across national borders limits the ability of businesses to take remedial legal action to protect against intellectual property theft of the transferred knowledge. Thus, to remain competitive around the globe, businesses must become more proactive in protecting their people and intellectual property from competitors and others who wish to damage world's economic system.
However, building large information technology (IT) departments to support the collaboration of ideas across geographical boundaries is especially difficult due to the need to have a large diverse IT workforce that can understand the language, culture, and intimacies of various foreign IT departments within their own companies. This difficulty is further complicated when IT departments from various companies must come to agreement on how to share data over separate and secure corporate data networks. Using a general purpose IT path such as the Internet exposes the business's intellectual property to unknown threats and also opens the possibility of outside attack to the corporate network by unknown or known hackers. Often times, the sheer inertia of trying to get the IT departments of two different companies to agree to firewall and other network protocols in sharing data between their two data networks prevents the desired collaboration from even taking place. Thus, most IT departments require a customized IT path between different network sites that requires agreement between different IT departments to setup and administer.
Accordingly, a new approach to providing a demonstrateably secure way to exchange data between different groups within and between businesses across the world is needed while protecting and insulating network infrastructures of the various businesses. Preferably this new approach can be achieved by the necessary collaborating groups with little or no IT department involvement, once the new approach is setup and approved. Thus, there is a need for a secure, reliable knowledge transport between two or more global sites that do not require a customized IT path between the sites' data networks.